Project Summary - Pilot and Feasibility Program The Pilot and Feasibility (P&F) Program provides seed research support, primarily for junior investigators during their critical transition years as new faculty members. The vast majority of our awards have gone to investigators who are in the early stages of their research careers, but we have also supported several established investigators whose proposals were exciting and innovative, but whose previous expertise and research lay outside the NORC research focus on in nutrition and obesity. We attribute the success of our Program to our careful mentoring, supportive role models, and rigorous and consistent critiques of research projects. Since the inception of our P&F Program in 1999, the NORC has awarded $2,341,927 to 58 investigators to support new and innovative research in nutrition and obesity. Based on their P&F pilot data, our awardees have received $42.2 million in external research support. Because the focus of the UNC NORC encompasses six main research areas (diet and physical activity, metabolic molecular phenotyping, intervention, animal metabolism, nutrigenetics, and clinical nutritional studies), we focus on supporting investigators who are developing cutting edge research in one of these areas.